Education and Toenails.

​One of the mantras that kept me sane while I was teaching was this:
 
When people know better, they do better.
 
It was a hard nugget of wisdom to swallow, because it often meant small failures on my part: usually that my instructions were not clear enough. This was humbling, but it made me more compassionate. It made me more aware of my students, and it made me pay closer attention to their work, to examine it for feedback. When they weren’t doing better, I knew something was off, and, as humbling as it is to admit, things were usually off on my end.
 
When people know better, they do better.
 
I have often found our foster child with her toes in her mouth, biting off her toenails. Or ripping them off with her tiny fingers and leaving their jagged husks sprinkled all over the cushions.
 
This made me want to simultaneously barf and scream.
 
Telling her to stop didn’t work. Asking nicely didn’t work. Pointing out how disgusting and unhygienic it was didn’t work. Scolding didn’t work. Rewards didn’t work; neither did punishments.
 
And then my mantra returned to me: When people know better, they do better. So I tried a different approach, and I asked her why she was tearing them off. I was expecting a typical non-answer response: Because. I don’t know. I just want to. I feel like it.
 
But her honesty surprised me: “They are too long and crooked and they get stuck on things,” she said. Which made perfect sense.
 
So I got out a clipper and offered to cut them for her.
 
She looked at the clipper in horror, like she'd never seen one before, and I realized there was a possibility she never had​ seen one before.  There was a chance she had been doing her own personal care her entire life, because she had probably never been shown a better way to trim her toenails.
 
So I showed her a better way.
 
When people know better, they do better.
 
I’ve gone from teaching a hundred kids how to properly research and document papers in MLA format to teaching one little girl how to clip her toenails. And both tasks feel equally important.
 
This is the true essence of teaching.
 
It has gotten so, so, so complicated in recent years: it has turned into standardized tests and No Child Left Behind and Common Core and New Math and highly qualified bullshit. We are drowning kids with more information than they need to know, information they will never again need in their lives but that teachers are required by law to shovel into their overstuffed minds: Herman Melville and quadratic equations and iambic pentameter and Joseph Stalin’s Five Year Plan and the color of George Washington’s white horse.  And every year, that list grows longer.
 
(I guarantee you that unless you study a language or play a lot of MadLibs, you’ll get by in life just fine without knowing the textbook definition of an adjective.)
 
This obsession with the “overpreparation” of students is one of the reasons I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to teaching English, even if my brain does calm down. It’s ridiculous. What the hell are we “overpreparing” these kids for?
 
Teaching shouldn’t be this complicated. It’s pretty simple, really: it’s just showing people how to do something they didn’t know how to do before, and repeating and modifying that process until it works. It’s ensuring that they understand and master the concept, whether that concept be clipping toenails or defining and properly identifying adjectives.  
 
And honestly, isn’t clipping toenails a more useful life skill than defining and identifying adjectives?